Albert Sabin

His Death A Reminder Of Wonder Of Medical Advances

March 05, 1993

How appropriate that a man whose work extended so many lives was rewarded with such a long life himself. Albert Sabin, whose name became a household word for a generation of schoolchildren taking vaccine-laced sugar cubes, was 86 when he died this week.

Sabin's contribution to mankind scarcely can be overestimated. His oral vaccine, an improvement over the first vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and requiring injection, led to the virtual eradication of polio in the United States and the rest of the industrialized world, and researchers expect it to be eliminated worldwide by the end of the century. The United States has not had since 1979 an outbreak of the disease that in one year, 1952, killed 3,100 Americans and paralyzed 21,000 others.

Sabin's death and other developments this week are reminders of what a difference medical advances can make. Sabin's polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 500,000 lives. Two breakthroughs were reported in the scientific journal Nature this week: identification of a gene that may cause some cases of Lou Gehrig's disease and an advance that may further treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Patience, hard work and man's insatiable curiosity are the ingredients necessary for medical research.

And one more: money. Let not the zeal to reduce health care costs and cut government spending slice too harshly into the resources necessary to finance potentially productive research such as Albert Sabin's.